The basic operation and structure of a land mobile communication system is well known. Land mobile communication systems typically comprise one or more communication units (e.g., vehicle-mounted or portable communication units in a land mobile system and communication unit/telephones in a cellular system) and one or more repeaters that transceive information via the RF communication resources. These communication resources may be narrow band frequency modulated channels, time division multiplex slots, frequency pairs, and so forth. Land mobile communication systems may be organized as trunked communication systems, where a plurality of communication resources is allocated amongst a group of users by assigning the repeaters on a communication-by-communication basis within an RF coverage area.
A communication system is comprised of a plurality of parts or objects, including devices, parts of the devices, and logical/physical entities. At various times throughout the lifetime of a communication system, each of the objects within the system may enter into an abnormal state or condition. An abnormal condition or state includes situations where the object has failed or malfunctioned, the object is not performing up to specification, an illegal carrier is detected on a channel or link, communication resource interference is detected, an object fails to respond, an object is under maintenance, and so forth. In order to maintain a communication system as efficiently as possible, it is desirable to know the present state of each of these objects. Prior systems engage various methods of keeping track of their objects, but systems typically track status either by polling each object (asking each object for its status), which is wasteful of bandwidth and time-consuming for large systems, or by receiving periodic status updates from various objects, which may not provide for constantly updated tracking information.
Accordingly, there is a need for an efficient method of obtaining and updating status information for all objects in a system that is either large or small, without wasting valuable bandwidth to perform the function.